Lonely Boy
by Miss Peg
Summary: A lonely boy grows into a lonely man. A Red John one-shot based on the prompt "Inside the darkest corners of a haunted mind, I see scattered pictures of a lonely child."


**Title: **Lonely Boy

**Author:** miss_peg

**Rating:** T

**Characters:** Red John (with mentions of Jane, Lisbon, Van Pelt and Craig O'Laughlin)

**Summary: **A lonely boy grows into a lonely man.

**Prompt: **GEN: Red John, "Inside the darkest corners of a haunted mind, I see scattered pictures of a lonely child." - Dana Kerstein, My Soul Ghost (posted by ch19777)

**Notes: **For the Paint It Red ficathon challenge. This is a MAJOR challenge for me, it's random, it's a risk...it's probably rubbish...it was fun to write though. Mostly made up stuff.

**Spoilers: **Season Three finale spoilers!

You wake in a pool of sweat surrounding your body as it seeps into the material of the bed sheets. You know, without remembering, that you've had the same nightmare you've suffered from since you were a young boy.

If anyone knew you, as the man who had done everything you'd done, they would classify you as mentally unstable. It wasn't every day that someone killed people and painted smiley faces on the wall as some kind of victory mark.

Everything you've read about yourself, in the newspapers, in the police reports, you're listed as a serial killer. They paint you as some nut job who knows all too well what the fuck you're doing, a man with intelligence that far exceeds most criminals. You know you're clever because you've always been one step ahead of everyone else.

It helps that as a child you met someone who would later become not only your best friend, but an FBI agent also.

As a child you were the one everyone picked on, the little ginger kid in the corner of the playground, ostracised for being different and a little bit weird. Your family never sent you to school in decent clothes and no matter how hard you tried to scrub the dirt from your skin, the other kids knew you were the one child who didn't get to have regular baths.

The few times anyone did play with you, you got hit by the tetherball as they lunged it directly for your head.

By the time you reached high school you were a loner. You'd been to various parent-teacher meetings where your alcoholic mother hadn't turned up. They'd written reports of concern about the paintings you'd drawn, the stories you'd written. There was concern that you, Little Johnny, were slipping off the path of normalcy. They forced you to visit the guidance counsellor before you'd even set foot in the high school doors making you late for your first class, putting you in prime position to be noticed by each and every one of the other students.

In your sophomore year a new student transferred in from Vermont, he had goofy teeth and bad breath and the quarterback took an instant dislike to him. You were pushed together not because you liked each other, or wanted to be friends, but because you were the only two people in the class that nobody else liked.

Craig O'Laughlin needed a friend as much as you did and so you spent your nights in his garage smoking hash and making alcoholic cocktails out of anything you could get your hands on. You smoked and drank your high school career away and somehow left with enough points on your SATs to get into college. That's when you went your separate ways. Craig's father had been a cop and you knew as well as he did, that he would go down the same route. He had high hopes to join the FBI and you knew he would one day achieve his goal. You made a pact the day before you moved to South California to protect each other for as long as you both lived, you didn't think at the time he realised just what that would mean.

You made it through two years of college before the girl you'd been seeing jacked off the college quarterback at the end of their successful Homecoming game. The same night, you butchered her to death because you couldn't bear the thoughts of the humiliation. She didn't love you, not like you loved her; she made that much clear the day she told you what happened.

You disappeared then, left a suicide note, which led the local cops to believe you'd drowned yourself in the river.

You didn't let them think any other way.

Only Craig knew you were still alive, had gotten off on the stories you told him about how you'd brutally murdered that girl. He asked questions and you felt a buzz telling him.

You did it again, just to feel the same buzz you felt the first time. And again, and again.

The day Patrick Jane taunted you on television, you used every resource you had to track down his family and kill them. You'd intended to murder his wife only, but an unexpected turn of events meant their little girl had been there too. You considered killing just the woman, but even you couldn't bear the thought of a child standing over their parent's body the way you had the day your father died. Even then you'd had a different kind of mind to everyone else, it was the memory of drawing smiley faces in your father's blood that led you to do it with your victim's.

You were seven. Not much older than Patrick Jane's little girl.

It became a game, a challenge, to see how far you could push the CBI before they would catch you. You took risks, more than you'd ever done before and you enjoyed the thrill of succeeding. The day Craig joined your little game, you felt proud, like a father might feel proud of his son for hitting the winning shot in baseball. You were proud of Craig for messing with the cute young agent's mind. Your intention was for him to get into Teresa Lisbon's life, but you knew it would always be harder. He loved her after all, _Jane_. He was besotted with her, that's what your information told you. So you went for Van Pelt instead.

The moment Teresa Lisbon told you Craig had been killed you knew it was over.

You were a serial killer without a thrill, a man without his manhood, a young boy without love. The day Craig died, you died too, not because Patrick Jane shot you, but because without your only friend, you were just a sad lonely man killing people for no good reason.


End file.
